


Tiny Glowing Screens Pt1

by DJVennalyn



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon deaths, Canon-Typical Violence, Revolution, So yeah have fun, edit: I'm also going to write it from d's perspective later, edit: i just realized its 11am at the time of posting so written between 8:30-11am, i cried twice writing this fyi, i was listening to the song Drive Drive Drive by Kimya Dawson while writing this, ill edit it later and what have you but i just want to post this before i forget, so there will be a pt2, there are going to be lots of errors just fyi beware and all that jazz, this is about tears, this is not about relationships, this is unedited and was also written between 8:30-10am after not sleeping for two days so, very much inspired by that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-31
Updated: 2016-07-31
Packaged: 2018-07-28 10:41:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7637020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DJVennalyn/pseuds/DJVennalyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A story about a girl named Rose and a boy named D and how they tried their best to survive in a world that wanted nothing more than to kill them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tiny Glowing Screens Pt1

At one, you came into this world in a burst of fire and light. You were a child of miracle, a child of magic, with no family to speak of. All straw blonde hair and deathly pale cheeks, you were quiet and observant as an infant even. You know that someone raised you, someone whom you cannot remember. Maybe raised by many, passed on like the white elephant gift which gets brought back every year much to the chagrin of anyone who receives it. Maybe you were kept by only one happy couple until they were happy no longer and they discarded you like last year’s fashion.

At four, you find yourself on the streets, barely fending for yourself. Learning how to hide and learning how to steal, you teach yourself and make your own way in the world. Your shoes wear out and the bottoms of your feet become sore; running becomes a necessary evil and old friend with whom you are all too familiar with. Your youthfulness and cute faces become a weapon used on unwitting passerby to get a few coins and the occasional bag of leftovers passed your way, their former owners scurrying away with a sense of unease at the child with the piercing violet eyes that seemed to stare into their souls. Some days you feast like a king, or at least you fancy you do. Other days you are every bit the starving, penniless pauper you are. 

At six, a kindly old woman finds you begging on the street corner outside her small sewing shop and takes pity on you. She brings you into her home, cleans you up, and gives you a warm meal. Her brown eyes like chocolate have crows feet at their edges, belying the age and her years spent smiling kindly as she smiles at you now. Her hair, also chocolate but beginning to fight a war with the onset of grey, is cut short into a serviceable bob. Your straw blonde hair reaches your waist and is unkempt from the years of never having been cut. You leave after a few days, not wanting to overstay your welcome, but you find yourself drawn back to her shop day after day. Each time you appear, she brings you in with a knowing smile and sits you down with food while she works. During the less busy hours at the shop, she teaches you things. How to knit, how to sew, how to read, who to read, and how to read people. You discover that she once wanted to be a writer, but her mother wanted her to be a psychologist, and that she had decided in the end to drop out of school to open a small business. You learn that she is forty-seven, and that she has never been in love and doesn’t expect to ever be. She talks about the places she’s seen and the places she would love to visit. She tells you wild stories about far of fictional lands and of princesses who take matters into their own hands. You don’t tell her about yourself, and she accepts that, but manages to coax little things about you anyway. She knows that your favorite colour is lavender but you have a fond spot for pink for a reason you cant explain. She knows that you have dreams, terrible dreams, about children forced to grow up alone and far before their times, dreams about giant black tentacled monsters that writhe in agony and scream words that are no language in existence but somehow make sense in the most horrible way. She calls you Rosie and the first time you cry in front of her, she holds you tight and tells you that it will be alright. She makes you dresses, beautiful sundresses in vibrant colours and buys you sandals with flowers on them and black velvet headbands to hold your hair back and you feel oh so pretty as she tells you that one must always dress to feel both beautiful and comfortable if they are to be happy with themselves. Slowly, so very slowly, you come to trust her.

You are seven when she asks you if you would like to be her daughter and live with her and you are seven when you say yes, trying your very best not to cry from happieness and excitement as she scoops you up into her arms despite her aching limbs and holds you so tight that you can’t imagine her ever letting go. You move in with her that very day, and she continues to teach you and care for you. You remember this time of your life fondly, and with a golden glow over it all. She dressed you in the brightest of colours and the prettiest of dresses which she made, always remembering to incorporate lavender into it for you. She has a room full of books, all of which she has given you permission to read. You begin to work your way through them hungrily, often keeping a large, unabridged dictionary next to you for when you come across words that are unfamiliar to you, which happens less and less the more books and poems you work your way through. You try your own hand at writing a few, and while the prose was clumsy and characterization rudimentary, She read through each and every one of them and pinned them on the fridge. When the fridge became too cluttered with papers covered in your blocky, nearly unintelligible handwriting, she took them to the printers to have them bound neatly in thick paper and rough binding. The paper is lavender coloured, and your name is written on it with her last name in addition. She asks you to sign it, and you happily oblige. It encourages you to write more, which you do. 

You are eight, and becoming better versed in writing and more aware of how those around you feel each day, when you bring her the newest of your short stories and you find her sobbing quietly in her room. She is almost fifty and she is dying. She refuses to talk to you about it, but you know. One day you stayed home while she went to work and you looked carefully through her room until you found a letter saying that she had stage three cancer, and not long to live. Untreatable, with almost no chance of survival. You leave her room completely in place except for the letter which you set primly at the foot of her bed. You cry in the library over a copy of Shakspear until she returns, at which point you clean up and pretend like you have not in fact been crying. She goes to her room to change into something more comfortable, and comes back a minute later with a pained expression on her face. She sits down in front of you and opens her mouth to say something. You close the book and leave the room, feeling unwanted tears come unbidden to your eyes.

You are nine when she dies. She died in the hospital bed and you sat by her side and held her hand and tried your best not to cry as she told you the last things she would ever say. She said to you “Rosie, don’t ever give up on your dreams. Whatever you want to do with your life, I want you to pursue it no matter what happens. Remember that I care about you Rosie, and don’t ever change. Love and respect yourself above all else, fight for what is right and don’t let anyone tell you who you should be or what you should do. I’m sorry I have to leave you so soon, I would do anything to stay with you. I’m sorry, I love you Rosie.” and you held back your tears and nodded and gripped her hand tighter as it began to slacken and you watched as she laid back and breathed her last breath, her eyes closing and the pain finally smoothing away from her features. 

You are nine and you are screaming and tears are pouring down your face and it takes four nurses to restrain you as you pour out all of your anger and sadness and resentment at the doctor who clearly didn’t try hard enough to save her and even through your dark haze you can see the pain in his eyes as he stands there and takes it. That day you are removed from the hospital, and you are brought back to her house by a nurse. You cry the whole way. She offers to stay with you, but you refuse. The kindly old woman had no living family, no one to care for her, so all of her effects would be sold off to pay for her hospital bills that she was far too poor to pay. You find the spare key, hidden where you and she had agreed upon in a crack in the concrete on the side of the steps, partially obscured by weeds. You enter the house and stand in the middle of the living room and scream in anger at the house so full of happy memories, now tainted by the death of the one person who showed you kindness in your entire life. You scream until your voice breaks and you can’t scream any more.

You are nine when you stand in front of the mirror in Her bathroom, sewing shears in hand and face still tear-streaked and mottled red from hours of crying. You hack away at your long blonde hair with a fierce determination until it is cut into a sloppy approximation of Her bob, your one last bit of homage to the woman whom you had lost. The strands of your hair fell to the floor and clogged the sink as you shed your bright sun dress, made only recently, and go into Her closet to find something more suitable for how you feel. You find a dress that you’ve never seen before, black with hints of dark purple, one probably used once for a special event never again. With clumsy stitching from you shaking hands you sew in the dress enough to fit you. It looks sharp and angry, but it suits how you feel and you somehow feel dangerous and comfortable in it. You feel that it works. You spend the next few hours gathering things from around her house to take with you and putting them into a small black suitcase you found deep in her closet. You pack the essentials: a few more quickly altered dresses, some canned food, any cash you can find, three of Her sets of knitting needles and a few balls of yearn, three of your favorite worn books and one that you’ve never read before whos’ eldritch cover calls to you, a picture that was taken of the two of you the year before in a time when you were both happy and alive. You pause when you find the book of your writings and read the name embossed on the cover. Rose Lalonde. After a moment to hold back the tears, you set the book gently in your suitcase before zipping it up. You leave the house without a backwards glance.

You are ten, and you’ve found work. The job isn’t glamorous, but it is enough. A librarian at a library you frequented must have connected the dots because she offered you a job shelving books for a small amount of money. You took her up on the offer, and spend your time off of work reading books around the library and writing yourself. Your writing improves and you are writing things that are actually passable as stories. The librarians teach you grammar, and you’ve been told that your reading and writing are on an upper high school level. You still choose to wear all black and you still keep your hair sheared short into a bob. 

You are twelve when you make your first friend. A boy about your age, skin as pale as yours and covered in cuts and scars that he proudly tell you are sword scars and you think he is making up, comes in and asks for books on how to write screenplays. He tells you his name is Devon. You don’t believe him. You don’t believe much that he says. You say that you’ll call him D. He comes in every day to pore over books on screenplay, brow furrowed as he takes notes on a water-damaged notebook in small, messy print. When he’s not concentrating on what he calls his “great masterpiece”, he’s following you around as you reshelve books, talking to you about anything and everything. He tells you wildly conflicting and fantastical stories about what he claims to be his life, and you take them for a grain of salt and respond with increasingly witty and sharp remarks. He takes it all in stride with a happy-go-lucky attitude and grins his way through anything you say. You learn that he wants to be a film writer and producer, and he learns that you want to be a writer one day. He jokes that you read so many books and you’ll one day become one. You tell him that he tells so many tall tales they’ll detract from his height. He calls you Rosie sometimes, and the first time he did it was like a sharp stab to the gut. He kept at it despite you telling him not to, and eventually the pain subsided into a dull ache.

You are both thirteen, and you two have both been working part time and odd jobs where you can. D comes up with the idea for you two to pool your money and pay for a shabby hotel room to live in. You know he sleeps in odd places and on whoever’s couch he can get, and he knows that you sleep in one of the cushioned chairs in the library. One of the librarians catches wind of your idea, and helps you with her age to book a cheap room, even being so kind as to pay for the first week herself. You and D move in, and share a tiny twin bed in a bedroom that is beyond cramped. You’re both happy, and both safe, for the first time in a long time. You often sit at the desk and write novels late into the night while he watches whatever terrible movie he can get for free on the limited number of stations available on the ancient black and white television the hotel provides, and you remind each other to sleep on nights when you begin to forget. You still have the nightmares, but they are of you now more than what you dreamt of when you were little. You dream now of a terrifying fish woman with dark grey skin whos hair moved around her like so many dark tentacles. You dream sometimes that she impales you. Other times you dream of clowns, and you drive them through with your knitting needles taken from Her house. You wake up in cold sweats, crying and once screaming, and D holds you until you stop, whispering comforting words to you. 

You are fourteen, and you are frightened. Mankind has made its first contact with alien life, and the mostly humanoid figure that revealed itself to have been living among us in the guise of the owner of Betty Crocker Corporation all this time was the spitting image of the terrifying woman from your dreams who killed you over and over. Her fuschia-painted lips spread into a wide smile as she shook hands and made nice showed razer-sharp teeth hiding just behind them. When you see the news story, you shake and you cry and D held you and you know that he is every bit as scared as you are. That night, you begin to write. 

You are fifteen and you have spent countless nights hunched over notebook after notebook as you write and revise and fill them with your story. The lack of sleep is beginning to take a visible toll on you in the bags under your eyes, and you convince a librarian to buy you some concealer and black lipstick which you wear to add an extra edge to the hard set of your lips. You feel fierce and dangerous and oh so very uncomfortable in the world. You don’t think as much of the woman who raised you, thoughts too consumed by your writing and the fear of crying. You have promised yourself to not cry again. You have finished your book, at last, and D is putting the finishing touches on his first “masterpiece screenplay”. From what of it you have both discussed, both of your works involve very obvious depictions of current political characters, thinly veiled under pseudonyms that aren’t even anagrams. The world has gone to shambles in this past year, with the alien Her Imperious Condescension taking more of a firm and established hold on the world’s politics. Your book, The Complacency of the Learned, is lengthy. Its’ prose shows marked improvement between the writings of your childhood kept bound in the desk drawer and now. You search for a publisher as D searches to find someone who has the “vision” for the production of his work. 

You are both fifteen, almost sixteen, when you find willing recipients who will look past your ages and to your actual work. 

You are both sixteen when your novel is published and his movie is produced some time later. You decide to dedicate your first novel to the kindly old woman, putting an excerpt from one of her favorite poems which she read to you often in the front. You take the first printed and bound copy, sign it, and put it in the desk drawer next to the tattered copy of your works which she had printed for you when you were young. 

You are sixteen and Guy Fieri has somehow been elected to the Supreme Court, and while the public is rightfully upset, the majority of the government and the alien queen endorse him fully. You shake the day you find out, but you do not cry. D writes him in last minute to his script, the scene barely making the final cut in time. 

You are seventeen, and rolling in money from both of your art, and you are working on the sequels. Your book already has quite a following all clamoring for a second, and D’s movie breached the top hundred grossing movies of the year. You have both once again pooled your money to buy a modest-sized apartment in Houston, next to where D would be filming his next movie. He gives a bark of a laugh when you arrive, and tells you wistfully he grew up here, thousands of miles from the town in Rainbow Falls, Michigan where the two of you met. You believe him. You have only one room, which you still share, and he still helps you with your increasing nightmares. He writes his second movie script as you write your second book, and once again you live together peacefully. D jokes that the two of you are incredibly domestic, says that it’s like the plot of a b-rate romance movie. You smile and nod, even though you both know it’s more like a shakespearian tragedy of the highest caliber, a story filled with humour and dick jokes but you just know that everyone is going to die at the end.

You are eighteen, and the Batterwitch as you’ve both taken to calling her is gaining more of the government’s ears. Between a mix of flattery and bribery, she has the whole government under her thumb. This year, you are both old enough to vote. This year, the candidates almost sure to win are two juggalos known as the Insane Clown Possey. Their cult following and endorsement by both Guy Fieri and the Batterwitch wins over the majority of the remaining population. Through various assassinations, likely planned by the Batterwitch, all of the Supreme Court but Guy Fieri has been eliminated along with several other dissenting government officials. You are eighteen when the ICP wins what will be the last free election and become the first and last dual juggalo presidents. You do not cry when they win by a landslide. You do not cry as you watch them begin to make terrible and nonsensical changes to the country’s long-standing laws and traditions. You Do Not Cry. 

You are eighteen, and you are so very tired. You publish your second book, continuing the plot of Complacency of the Learned, and it is even more of a hit than the first. D publishes another movie, and tells you that he has decided to go by Dave from now on. You smile and nod, but you both know that in private you will still call him D. You begin getting invited to events for the rich and famous, and you spend the hours that you’re not writing painstakingly sewing elaborate dresses for yourself to exact specifications. Dave gets his suits tailored, but still occasionally wears a bathrobe and fuzzy slippers to red carpet events. The first time you got on him about it while you were getting ready to leave he pushed his shades on top of his head, paused his show, and looked up at you from his position slouched on the couch with a lopsided grin and said “What’s the point of wearing fancy clothes and looking nice to others if you’re not comfortable in what you’re wearing Rosie? You’ve gotta be comfortable in your skin to love yourself.” And you stood there, mouth open, and tried your hardest to push down tears as thoughts came unbidden of a woman many, many years ago who had said something very similar to you. A woman whom you had almost forgotten, your hair now hanging down several inches past your shoulders. You went back to your room and changed from the form-fitting black dress you were wearing into a lavender dress with a long flowing skirt and long sleeves that you had made ages ago on a whim but never worn. You stood in front of the bathroom mirror and used your sewing scissors to messily chop off your hair into a bob again, uneven and choppy and every bit the reminder you needed to stay true to yourself.

You are nineteen, and you and Dave are both rich beyond means. You can have anything you want at the drop of a few bills, and there isn’t a person alive who doesn’t know your names. The public whispers about your relationship with Dave, and you both refuse to either confirm or deny anything as rumors fly. Dave jokes about the two of you being soulmates. You smile, but don’t reply. The nightmares are getting worse and you both know it and no amount of makeup will quite cover the dark bags under your eyes from lack of sleep. You’ve both taken to letting off steam in fights these past few years, you with a special pair of knitting needles you had commissioned in lavender and he with a samurai sword he purchased offline. You both are brought away from your home more often as your respective lines of work demand, and you see each other less and less despite keeping in constant contact. Some nights you feel his loss from your side acutely when you wake up in a cold sweat, clutching the sheets and panting, and he isn’t there to comfort you and ground you in reality. You occasionally use alcohol to drown your thoughts some, careful to keep it hidden from the world but easy enough to obtain with your wealth and celebrity status. You put out your third book, this one nearly to the end of the saga, and from the opposite side of the country you learn that D is almost done producing his third movie. 

You are twenty, and you and Dave are both closer than ever and more distant than you thought it possible to be. Constantly fraternizing with other celebrities and people who always want something has made you both jaded and loath to drop your personas which you keep up for the world. When you are together, it takes time, but once you manage to drop what you can of your carefully constructed facades you sit down and discuss everything and nothing, talking like when you were children. The political situation has grown far worse, and the game you two play of passive-aggressively mocking the key players has grown far more dangerous. With the stakes so high, you think you must need to cry soon. But you never do. You uphold your promise to yourself and hold it in. You remember the words of the kind old woman, even as her face fades from your mind, and you do your best to remember them and live your life in a way that would make her proud. Sometimes you doubt that she could ever be proud of you and what you’ve become. Other times you know that she must be.

You are twenty-one and jointly celebrating your birthdays when D tells you that he thinks he loves you, words slurring and the stench of alcohol clinging to him. You tell him you’ll talk to him about it when he’s sober. You know you love him, but you also know that you don’t love him in the same way he loves you. You think that you’re probably going to die alone without having loved anyone, just like the kind woman whose name is no more than a muted and warped sound in your mind now. Only her last name, which you’ve kept all this time, has stayed. Lalonde. Her name. Your name. Your hair, still held back by the black headband she gave you all those years ago, has darkened some. You always cut it yourself and take the time to remember her and her final parting words. Never stray from being yourself, fight for what is right, and don’t let anyone tell you who you should be or what you should do. You think about those words as you sit on a barstool in a crowded club on your twenty first birthday, nursing some fruity drink and watching D make a fool of himself on the dance floor. You finish that drink, but you don’t have another. That night you dream of a sunny day in a wood-floored living room trying on a new sundress while Lalonde smiled kindly and laughed. You awake and your pillow is damp, but you chalk it up to drool and spend the rest of the early hours writing frantically to take your mind off of it.

You are twenty-two, celebrating your birthday, when you find out. You have a sudden image of two children, yours and D’s, who grew up without either of you. Dave finds you collapsed on the couch of your first apartment in Houston, which you both kept of of nostalgia, several hours later. You are shaking, and the closest to tears you’ve been in a long time. You tell him what you saw, about your children and how they’re the most beautiful wonderful kids you’ve ever seen. You tell him that you saw them growing up alone, without you, without anyone, in a world controlled by the Batterwitch. You don’t tell him that you saw yourself once again being run through by the Batterwitch, something you haven’t dreamt or seen since you were a child. He holds you close and tells you it will be alright. You are twenty-two when he asks you to fight the corrupt government and the Batterwitch with him, and you are twenty-two when you accept. You begin to spar now with the intent of being able to battle, not just to let off steam. He begins to smoke, more and more and more. You tell him every time you see him with one that they’re cancer sticks that will kill him, and every time he gives you a wry half-smile as he takes a deep drag and lets it out, telling you that it won’t be the cigarettes that do it. You know he’s right, and you know it doesn’t matter, but still you tell him not to.

You are twenty-three, and you know that you are going to die. You’ve published your fourth and final book, and D has produced two more movies. At night you dream of your future child who will grow up without you yet make wonderful friends, who will play a game which ends this wretched world once and for all, and who finally kills the Batterwitch herself. You dream that her name is Roxy, and when you awaken you finally remember the once-blurred name of the woman who raised you, Roxanne, and you decide that it is the perfect name for her. You tell D all of this, except for the fact that your attempt at killing the Batterwitch is futile and doomed to fail. Let him have hope for your success. You tell him all about your dreams except for the ones in which you are murdered by the Batterwitch. Let him have hope for your lives. You tell him all about your dreams except for the ones where the eldritch lovecraftian horrors which haunted you in your youth return to haunt you, their terrible screeches echoing in your head even during your waking hours now. Let him have hope for your sanity. You know that he is aware you’re withholding information, but he doesn’t press.

You are twenty-four and you are doing everything you can to keep yourself busy so that you aren’t afraid. You figured out eventually which of your houses the kids were going to grow up in. D’s kid would live in your apartment in Houston and your child, Roxy, would live on the property you bought in Rainbow Falls, Michigan. You both prepare the houses for the literal apocalypse, stocking them with food that would last for years and drinks aplenty, making sure there were backup generators upon backup generators, etc. You know you don’t have long, and you rush to get as much done as you can. You each find time to write a letter to leave for your respective children, explaining everything to them and preparing them as best as you can. You still don’t know the name of D’s child, so he calls him ‘lil man’ in his letter. You end your letter to roxy with the same words of wisdom that were imparted on you at a young age, “Roxy, don’t ever give up. Remember that I care about you Rosie, and don’t ever change. Love and respect yourself above all else, fight for what is right and don’t let anyone tell you who you should be or what you should do. I’m sorry I can’t be there for you, I would do anything to stay with you. I’m sorry, I love you Roxy Lalonde,” changed slightly for her situation, but the same gist. You felt like crying, but took a deep breath, sealed the envelope, and left the house instead.

You are twenty-five, and you are leaving to fight first Guy Fieri, then the ICP, and then finally the Batterwitch. You know you are going to die. D has been tense, jumping and flashstepping around as he sharpens his sword and loosens up before you leave. You, are choosing your outfit. As silly as it seems given the situation, focusing on your appearance is calming to you. As a wise woman once said, “one must always dress to feel both beautiful and comfortable if they are to be happy with themselves.” You choose a white dress. It is made of a soft but durable material, and has a sash of lavender. It is long-sleeved, easy to move in, and you feel comfortable, powerful, dangerous, and at peace with yourself in it. You cut your hair one last time, using sewing shears as always, and make sure that your bob is held out of your face by the black headband you’ve had all these years.

You are twenty-five, and you have just assassinated two presidents in a strife on the roof of the white house. Your white dress is splattered with their blood, and your knitting needles are caked in it. You hold your head high as you meet up with D on top of a skyscraper and prepare. He is twenty-five and he has just killed the last remaining member of the Supreme Court, Guy Fieri’s blood caked on his sword laying next to him as he squats on the edge of the skyscraper. He has been here longer than you. The ground is littered with nearly a pack of cigarettes, and he is smoking one right now, its’ thin tendrils of cancer-causing smoke drifting up from in front of his silhouette in the burning and rising morning light. It signals the end of what has been a hellish night for both of you, and signals the beginning of both of your last day. You stand behind him to his left, and you both survey the silent and dead city in silence for the last time. 

You are twenty-five, and you are losing. At first the fight seemed to be evenly matched, but she was just toying with you. It went downhill oh so very fast, and your dress was quickly drenched in more of your red than her fuchsia. You went down first, your dual needles no match against her long-range lancelike trident. One moment she was several meters away, and the next she was close in your face with her leering, toothy, pink grin as she drove her trident solidly into your midsection. You heard D scream your name. She removed the trident and moved to fight him as you fell to the ground, coughing up blood and bleeding copiously from the three large holes in your body. Not even a minute later, you heard a grunt of Pain from D as he fell next to you, run through instead with his own sword. You on your stomach and he on his back, your blood intermingles on the hot concrete as the Batterwitch laughs over your corpses before leaving you to die. You cough once and reach your hand weakly out towards D, your best and only friend, a wry smile-turned-grimace on your face. He gave you a similar grin, and stretched his hand out to take yours. You lay like that for several long, excruciating minutes without speaking until your breathing becomes labored and your vision starts to fog over. You hear laughter, and you swear you see Roxanne telling you that she’s proud of you, you did well, and it’s time to rest now. You feel tears start to flow down your face, but you're too far gone to care. You've done it, and you're allowed to cry now. Your eyes close with a smile, and you know it will be alright.

You are twenty-five, and you are dead.


End file.
